Re: Reviewing versioned backups

[Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net>]

Michael Heerdegen <michael_heerdegen@web.de> writes:

> Philip Kaludercic <philipk@posteo.net> writes:
>
>> I have been using version-control for years now, but have always
>> wondered if there was a better way to review previous versions besides
>> just going into your backup directory and manually comparing them. Is
>> there maybe a vc backend that uses the backup information? Or has
>> someone written some code to make it easier that they would care to
>> share?
>
> Magit has the "wip" modes that do more or less exactly that if your VCS
> is Git.  Once set up, backups are created automatically before and/or
> after each save (or at will).  They are saved in a chain of commits
> under a special reference name derived from your current branch's name.
>
> Big advantage: Git handles backups and you can do all the cool things
> like adding tags and annotations; Git can use delta compression to avoid
> wasting disk space, and all of this stuff.  One disadvantage currently:
> When you accidentally wip-commit something you didn't want to (e.g. a
> very large file or something containing passwords), you currently need
> to repair that accident using lowest-level git commands unless you can
> live with resetting the whole history to a prior state.  But apart from
> that, it works conveniently, there are log commands for your wip commits
> and such things etc.

This is interesting, but doesn't ~git~ fit my use-case, as I don't
always use Git as my VCS and I use a lot of unversioned files. But thank
you for the pointer, it might come in handy at some point in time!

-- 
	Philip K.